MOUNT PLEASANT, Texas -- The crime was one of the most brutal ever seen in East Texas. Four years ago this week, three employees of a Pizza Hut in Mount Pleasant were shot, stabbed and beaten to death in a late-night robbery of the restaurant. As a newspaper reporter, Charley Harrist had interviewed hundreds of accused criminals -- most of whom swore to their innocence. It was no different three years ago in his jailhouse interview with Calvin Loyd Padgett, one of four people accused of the grisly Pizza Hut murders.

The first night I spent in the back seat of my Volkswagen was outside San Antonio. I'd bombed past El Paso nearly 10 hours earlier and, dripping with exhaustion, I finally parked under a tree and passed out, oblivious to the seat-belt nubs digging into my spine like a mugger's cold revolver. In the morning, a woman perched rigid-straight in a Mercedes SUV awoke me by honking an emphatic staccato. "Young lady," she said, her voice spiked with pinched disdain. "That's prah-vate prah-perty you're pahr-ked on."

I totally agree with your position on Christians and foster care. In fact, it has been done successfully in East Texas (http://www.marriage savers.org/Columns/ C998.htm). Christians should read Matthew 25 before they criticize these actions, and they should read it and ask why they are not doing more for foster children.

I totally agree with your position on Christians and foster care. In fact, it has been done successfully in East Texas (http://www.marriage savers.org/Columns/ C998.htm). Christians should read Matthew 25 before they criticize these actions, and they should read it and ask why they are not doing more for foster children.

DALLAS -- Bob Shelton, whose hillbilly music and humor delighted radio audiences in the 1940s, has died at his home at Yantis in East Texas. He was 77. Mr. Shelton, whose full name was Robert Shelton Attlesey, died at 8:30 p.m. Thursday night, a relative said. The singer-comic was a regular on radio station WFAA`s "Early Bird" breakfast club show each morning in Dallas with his brothers Joe and Merle. His brothers died several years ago. Bob and Joe and the Sunshine Boys were popular across Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana.

Federal officials on Thursday moved four black families into an all-white public housing complex in the east Texas town of Vidor that had been seized by the government after an earlier integration attempt failed. Police stood guard as three moving vans and at least three carloads of black motorists drove up to the 74-unit complex. Housing and Urban Development officials said four families - two single women with children, one single woman and one single man - moved into the complex before dawn.

By John Schwartz The New York Times and Information from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram was used to supplement this report, April 18, 2003

Before space shuttles return to flight, NASA needs to develop better ways to inspect its aging fleet and ensure that photos are taken during every mission, the independent board investigating the loss of the shuttle Columbia said on Thursday. The preliminary recommendations, the first to be formally issued by the Columbia accident investigation board, will be part of a final report to be issued this summer. The chairman of the board, Adm. Harold W. Gehman, said this week that these and other interim recommendations would help the National Aeronautics and Space Administration begin making its program safer without having to wait for the full report to emerge.

Dear Abby: I recently witnessed something outside the local Kmart that left me livid. A man was speaking to a young lady in a foreign language, when all of a sudden, another man who appeared to be in his 60s began to chastise them for not speaking English. His exact words were: "This is America. People speak English here!" He stormed off when I stepped in and pointed out that HIS ancestors weren't born here, and they probably didn't speak English, either. When I ride the train to work, I see people with Middle Eastern backgrounds get dirty looks from other passengers.

When Mark Tullos drops off a check for a five-bedroom house in Wellington this morning, it becomes official: The new executive director for the Armory Art Center in West Palm Beach will have a place to live when he takes over the post Aug. 14. Along with his wife and three of their four children, Tullos, 39, brings to Palm Beach County 18 years of experience in the museum world. Most recently, he led a capital campaign at Louisiana's Alexandria Museum of Art, raising $5.8 million for expansion.

Kim Wozencraft`s Rush seems to be the first middle-class white girl junkie novel for the "thirtysomething" generation. It`s full of meaningful brand names: Percodan, Preludin, Valium, Crank, Mexican Brown and that ubiquitous generic, methyl-benzoyl-ecognine -- cocaine. And it is told to the tune of late `70s and early `80s rock and country: J.J. Cale, Supertramp, Lou Reed, Patsy Cline and Steely Dan. Which is probably why the movie rights were sold for a million bucks before it was even finished.

By John Schwartz The New York Times and Information from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram was used to supplement this report, April 18, 2003

Before space shuttles return to flight, NASA needs to develop better ways to inspect its aging fleet and ensure that photos are taken during every mission, the independent board investigating the loss of the shuttle Columbia said on Thursday. The preliminary recommendations, the first to be formally issued by the Columbia accident investigation board, will be part of a final report to be issued this summer. The chairman of the board, Adm. Harold W. Gehman, said this week that these and other interim recommendations would help the National Aeronautics and Space Administration begin making its program safer without having to wait for the full report to emerge.

Dear Abby: I recently witnessed something outside the local Kmart that left me livid. A man was speaking to a young lady in a foreign language, when all of a sudden, another man who appeared to be in his 60s began to chastise them for not speaking English. His exact words were: "This is America. People speak English here!" He stormed off when I stepped in and pointed out that HIS ancestors weren't born here, and they probably didn't speak English, either. When I ride the train to work, I see people with Middle Eastern backgrounds get dirty looks from other passengers.

They didn't mourn Chris Campbell here Thursday morning as much as celebrate his life. And, really, in the end, we should all be so fortunate. With his No. 48 Hurricanes jersey draped across a lectern on the flower-filled stage at Gusman Hall, Campbell was memorialized as "a perfect soul," a caring young man with a wonderful sense of humor whose life was cut short Saturday morning in an automobile accident. The indelible imprint Campbell left behind in his almost 22 years was evident by the hundreds who walked across the University of Miami's campus on this slightly overcast day to fill the Gusman's every seat and line its aisles.

I once lived in the Lone Star State, so I should have known what was coming as I waited with a group of Orlando editorial writers to meet Texas Gov. George W. Bush. Everything is big, and often brash, in Texas. The Dallas Cowboys once were "America's Team," and who else besides Texans would come up with promoting their state as "a whole other country" simply to drum up tourism. Bush didn't disappoint; the man from Austin has a presence. He took the room like an East Texas thunderstorm and overshadowed that other "Gov.

When Mark Tullos drops off a check for a five-bedroom house in Wellington this morning, it becomes official: The new executive director for the Armory Art Center in West Palm Beach will have a place to live when he takes over the post Aug. 14. Along with his wife and three of their four children, Tullos, 39, brings to Palm Beach County 18 years of experience in the museum world. Most recently, he led a capital campaign at Louisiana's Alexandria Museum of Art, raising $5.8 million for expansion.

With three capital murder convictions in hand, the talk in this small town has centered on mending racial divides and Jasper's bruised reputation, and on returning to a life free of television cameras and microphones. By Nov. 19, most of the TV trucks had pulled out and the metal detectors inside the peach stucco courthouse had been shoved from the entrances and packed away. On Nov. 18, Shawn Allen Berry became the last of three white men convicted for the June 7, 1998, dragging death of James Byrd Jr., a black man. Berry was sentenced to life imprisonment, becoming the only one of the three to escape a death sentence.

It seemed we had reached state-of-the-art absurdity in Florida last month, when we had the now-legendary Kiddie Deer Hunt in the northern part of the state. Ah yes, who could forget the memorable moments, when 8-year-olds would go blasting away at deer as the proud old man stood nearby? And yes, it certainly was thrilling when the 8-year-old could bring his dead deer home, giving him something else to play with when he got tired of his Leggo toys. All of this excitement, of course, was sponsored by the state of Florida.

WASHINGTON -- A Republican national committeeman from Florida boasted on Monday that he cashed in on his political clout at the Department of Housing and Urban Development to make hundreds of thousands of dollars as a consultant on low-income rent subsidy projects. The GOP official, William Taylor, said he worked at times with Deborah Gore Dean, the once-powerful aide to former HUD Secretary Samuel R. Pierce Jr., to get approval of federal grants in Florida, Georgia and Texas. Those grants brought him fees and equity interests totaling more than $500,000, Taylor said.

One Sunday night last fall, Chelsea Elder was driving to her grandmother's house in East Texas. Her mother and younger siblings were asleep in the car. Alone with her thoughts, the 15-year-old replayed the previous evening's events in her mind. She'd had a lot of fun at the Dallas Stars game with her best friend, Meagan Zidell, and Meagan's father, Marc. Chelsea admired Zidell. He was kind and funny, and he knew how to talk to kids. He was like a second father to her. And he was single.

After two days of testimony from psychologists, law-enforcement officials and the killer's weeping father, an East Texas jury decided on Thursday that the world would be better off without John William King in it. The seven men and five women on the jury -- its sole black member, a corrections officer acting as foreman -- decided in under three hours that the white supremacist should die by lethal injection for the 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr., a...